Christopher Buckley. Make Russia Great Again. Simon & Schuster, 2020.

The last book I read and reviewed was pretty intense, to say the least. I needed something a little lighter, something that might make me smile. I had heard that Christopher Buckley was funny, and this was a book of his that the library I was visiting owned.

As could be gathered from the title, Make Russia Great Again is a satire on the Trump administration. It is funny, and the satire is light enough that even fans of our former president would get a kick out of it.

While a few of the characters have their real names (Trump, Mike Pompeo), most are slightly disguised, though anyone who reads the news can figure out who they are, e.g., Vice President Pants.

Our narrator, Herb Nutterman, was a top manager at a Trump hotel whom the newly elected president has asked to serve as chief of staff. He has a view of nearly everything that is going on, even things that he wishes he did not know.

There are a number of recurring themes, Trump’s inclination towards “good-looking” people, his dependence on the Fox News commentator “Seamus Colonnity” for media support, his lack of filter, and the hostility of the mainstream media. All of these have the potential for humor, and Buckley makes the most of them.

The basic plot itself is silly enough, but perhaps believable. A Russian oligarch named Oleg Pishinsky is blackmailing President Trump. Pishinsky has numerous business ventures, but he is known for patenting the poison that has been used to assassinate journalists and former Russian officials that have run afoul of Putin. As a result Pishinsky is persona non grata in most countries.

Nutterman has to meet with him in the Vatican—one sovereign nation that does not belong to Interpol. To avoid attracting attention, the CIA has Nutterman, who is Jewish, dress as a Catholic Monsignor. What could go wrong? Especially as someone uses their meeting to attempt to kill Oleg. (Later a submarine will sink Oleg’s yacht in the Black Sea.)

I recall back in the sixties, Russian spies had tried to blackmail President Sukarno of Indonesia by filming him with prostitutes. It backfired. Sukarno, a Muslim, wanted them to show the films to his wives to show that he was still manly. Something similar happens with the plot to blackmail Trump.

There are a whole cast of characters, many of whom we recognize such as the former ambassador to the United Nations and governor of South Carolina, Trump’s son-in-law “Jored” who resembles a figure in a wax museum, and sleazy government bureaucrats of all persuasions.

The plot that inspired the title in part is because of Oleg but also because of a rogue Artificial Intelligence program sponsored by one of the seventeen American intelligence agencies. It is programmed to kick in automatically whenever an American election has been tampered with by foreign powers. It avenges America by tampering with the election of the meddling nation. So the opposition Communist Party in Russia defeats Putin in a landslide.

While America is no friend of Putin, it certainly does not want a return to Soviet Communism. As they say, politics makes strange bedfellows. In this case, the result is a political farce that, I suspect, people of all political persuasions outside of Russia will enjoy. I suspect even former president Trump might get a laugh out of it. He does not take himself that seriously, does he?